I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, thinking about MBAs and job hunting. I have a soft spot for folks in full-time graduate programs, because it’s hard to spend two years with your brain split down the middle. When you go back to school to improve your career-type marketability, you have to study hard in order to get good grades and learn everything you can. You’re expected to be focused on your studies. At the same time, you’ve got to keep one eye on the horizon — on your post-graduation job search, that is – which can be unnerving, since the full-time program doesn’t allow you to do lots of things that you’d do if you were actively job-hunting right now.

In a full-time MBA program, you’re in school to boost your career, but you can’t act on what you’re learning — reaching out to employers to start conversations, for instance — in the way that full-time working people get to do. It takes nerves of steel to reach out to corporate leaders in the first place, and when your message is “I’d love to meet you if you have time – I’m going to be graduating in a year and a half, and it would be wonderful to meet you now in anticipation of that event” the overture is even harder to make.

I teach MBA candidates (that’s what MBAs-in-training are called) job search and personal branding techniques, so I spend a lot of time thinking about MBAs and jobs.

The young people in my class are full-time students at the Leeds School of Business at CU-Boulder. I get MBAs in my workshop series for Northwestern University, also, and I hear the same themes across the country. “Do employers really value an MBA?” they ask me. “Will they [employers] give me a job that will let me pay back my student loans, and justify the cost and hassle of a two-year program that disrupted my life in a big way?”

I tell the MBA candidates the truth. I tell them that the organizations they’re targeting for their post-diploma job hunts will value their new MBAs exactly as much as the students themselves do. In other words, if a kid returns to school to fix some defect that the kid sees in himself, employers will not be excited. If the MBA is a check mark that a kid believes will magically qualify him or her for higher-paying jobs, ditto. If a person goes to school (for any program — an MBA or a Bioinformatics Certificate, or anything at all) and learns something about him- or herself, the new grad’s mojo will be ten times stronger. The learning in a grad-school program isn’t confined to the coursework. With luck, a person in school learns more from looking in the mirror, talking through situations with other students, and getting altitude on his or her own career than from the textbooks, which after all, teach methods that people can as easily acquire on the job as in a classroom.

Thinking about MBAs and jobs two weeks ago, it struck me that the last thing my students needed was another boring article or handbook or set of instructions for the job hunt. Armed with marker and drawing paper, I wrote this 29-page Quick & Dirty MBA Job Search Guide, and invited the students to download it when I met them in class. You can download it, too, and share it with your MBA-candidate friends or use it for your own MBA-type job search.

Lots of the topics I covered in the sharpietastic Quick & Dirty MBA Job Search Guide are ones I’ve dug into in earlier Personal Interest columns. Some of those how-to columns are:

If you have MBA-type job-search questions — or any job-search or career questions at all, for that matter – leave your question in a comment below, and I’ll try to answer it in a future column soon. The job search world is big and confusing. One of our goals in the Personal Interest blog is to boil down some of that complexity and make job search advice more human and more simple.

I almost forgot! The last page of the Quick & dirty MBA Job Search Guide is a little poster designed to get MBA candidates into their local career-placement offices or career centers. If I were dean of a B-school (or any other kind of school) I’d make ongoing career counseling a fundamental part of an academic program, rather than an add-on. Why does a person go after an MBA, if not to improve his or her employment situation? I don’t understand why career centers have to work themselves to death getting students even to stop in, so I drew a little poster to help them spread the word. I used the term “Career Connections,” because that is the name of the career center at the Leeds School of Business (where they do an awesome job helping MBA candidates hook up with tremendous employers). If you run a career center that has a different name, leave a comment and I’ll create a little poster for you too, using your career center’s name in it (but not ’til after Christmas)!